239 The Lower Depths

[Wood Tick]

Jean Gabin and Louis Jouvet are so wonderful in the Renoir version that I really just wanted the film to follow their rags'n'riches friendship for the entire way. Alas, that wasn't the movie Renoir was making. After the fantastic "robbery" scene, the film loses momentum and sinks into pretty dull melodrama. Poor Gorky, poor Renoir. Also, some unbelievably bad faux-facial hair. Yowza!

I had the same feeling about wanting it to be about Gabin and Jouvet. However even though it became less less great beyond the meeting of the pair, and might have lost some of it's gloss, I don't think the film ever became dull. I found the characters charming and remained engaged all the way through.

[bottled spider]

In the Kurosawa, does anybody know what the text reads written on the back itinerant priest's garments? Or what the characters are on the curtain to the ex-actor's bed?

Although I didn't like it much the first time I saw it, it's grown to be one of my all-time favourites. With each viewing it seems more and more cinematic, and also more of a comedy, albeit, in Richie's phrase, a wretched one.

I didn't like the Renoir version either the first time, and switched it off about twenty minutes in, but I loved it when I tried it again. As always with a Renoir, it's full of casually good compositions, and as always with Gabin, he's the epitome of style.

[movielocke]

The first twenty minutes or so of Renoir's film are completely superb, delightful and masterful storytelling, it almost feels like it's going to become some sort of odd proto-Melville film with a Lubitsch bent to the humor. Then, all of sudden, we're thrust into a tenement set and we stay there for the rest of the film. I realized after the fact that this is where the Gorky play begins, and the preceding was Renoir's wholely new preface to that text, but the whole remainder of the film, while enjoyable lacked the panache of the opening and left me wondering when the movie was going to redeem the magnificent promise of its opening. Sadly, the film never rises back up to that level, so the sense of bait and switch never quite left me. I'm very curious to see Kurosawa's take, because as I started to get into the Gorky part of the film, I kept thinking, "this seems right up Kurosawa's alley."

[movielocke]

Just watched the Kurosawa film, and it's fascinating how from the first ominous gong, he sets a wholely different, much more apt tone for the film to come. Renoid gives you the bait and switch, almost apologizing for the grimness of the piece with his frothy Lubitschy prologue, Kurosawa, on the other hand, summons you into the underworld so to speak, with five gong hits that seriously freaked out my cat for some reason. I almost feel as though this could be remade once again as an anime/scifi dystopia, with the denizens of the lower depths literally being the 'ground floor' dwellers of a megalopolis, and most of the world doesn't ever go down to the surface level, living their entire lives literally walking all over these folk.

I much prefer Kurosawa's version. He feels more comfortable with the material, it's stunningly rendered with magnificent deep space compositions and complex stagings and reactions, it's almost a textbook example of composing along the z axis, just brilliant and rich to look at. Additionally, the performances he gets out of his actors are far better; Renoir relies on Gabin's star charisma, but many of the other performances aren't cohesive to the piece, with some of the actors often seeming to be doing their own thing. To an extent this works, but I recall some bad performances in the French version. Kurosawa undermines Mifune, in a way, he keeps him off screen for the beginning and ending of the film, this gives it a very tidal ebb and flow in the dramatic momentum. People may come and go, but the lower depths always remains the same. Thematically that blasts the film out of the narrowness of the mileau and into a more wide ranging reading, one that gets rather philosophical. This is not a narrow class screed and you can really feel the Russian origins of the work pulsating out of Kurosawa's adaptation. Throughout the film I kept thinking about how much richer a work this is, and that was just in the middle of act one, before things have really taken off.

If there's a major sour note for me, it was the moronic dissonance of a film that is clearly set in the 1850s Tokugawa period, made in the 1950s, being given an English subtitle script whose idiom is clearly set in 1980s New York. It is incredibly distracting. I kept wondering when Mifune was going to bust out "dude!" And I think the subtitles have about 9 different translations of "baka!" throughout the film, which certainly did not need that level of "inventive" translation. the film doesn't need a translaotr to "fix" anything, I wish they would stop trying so hard to make it all kewl.

[Michael Kerpan]

Yes, AK's version seems much more true in spirit to the source material than Renoir's. And it is visually quite remarkable.

[FakeBonanza]

The first twenty minutes or so of Renoir's film are completely superb, delightful and masterful storytelling, it almost feels like it's going to become some sort of odd proto-Melville film with a Lubitsch bent to the humor. Then, all of sudden, we're thrust into a tenement set and we stay there for the rest of the film. I realized after the fact that this is where the Gorky play begins, and the preceding was Renoir's wholely new preface to that text, but the whole remainder of the film, while enjoyable lacked the panache of the opening and left me wondering when the movie was going to redeem the magnificent promise of its opening. Sadly, the film never rises back up to that level, so the sense of bait and switch never quite left me. I'm very curious to see Kurosawa's take, because as I started to get into the Gorky part of the film, I kept thinking, "this seems right up Kurosawa's alley."

What's most unfortunate about the film, from the arrival at the tenement, is that the character of the baron is cast aside. To me, Louis Jouvet's performance is the best part of the film, and it never quite recovers from abandoning the baron's point-of-view. Hell, the best moment in the latter part of the film is his rather isolated "life as a series of uniforms" monologue.

Some of the elements of the more conventional romantic plot appear, to greater effect, in Le crime de Monsieur Lange and La bete humaine (the latter with the superior Gabin performance). There's still plenty in the film that I enjoy, and Renoir's unique brilliance is on display throughout. The entirety of the scene in which Nastia dines with the inspector is masterful.